So many things were big, big, BIG at the 1893 World’s Fair that it may have been easy to miss the world’s biggest squash.

On display in the Horticultural Building in late September was a quarter-ton “monster squash” from Canada. Gourdzilla received some proud coverage back home in the September 29, 1893, issue of the Windsor Star, which reported on the sensational vegetable:

“Ontario is again the sensation provider for the fair. No longer is the “Canadian Mite,” as the big cheese is called, the undisputed sovereign in the realm of prodigious products. This time the vegetable kingdom furnishes the most monstrous attraction of the world’s fair. A milk-white squash, weighing 486 pounds and measuring over 11 feet in circumference has been on exhibition the past week in the Ontario vegetable court of the Horticultural Building. There is an enormous crowd about the mammoth gourd at all times. Nothing like it in point of advertising merit has been seen here yet. The Fair authorities are greatly bothered about the blockading of the wide aisles and passages surrounding this garden growth from Ontario. Mr. William Warnock, of Goderich, Ont., sent the huge squash, over which Superintendent D. Reed proudly presides.”

Ontario’s portion of the Canadian Exhibit in the Horticultural Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

How Big Was it?

Warnock kept growing monster veggies for years to come. Garnering press attention in 1901 was his 322-pound “freak” pumpkin, which he scooped out in order to fit his five-year-old daughter inside.

William Warnock’s giant pumpkin in 1901 may or may not have been bigger than his 1893 squash at the World’s Fair in Chicago.

Smithsonian Magazine, however, reports a slimmer figure for his earlier gourd for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition:

“William Warnock, a machinist and farmer from Goderich, Ontario. In 1893, he produced a 365-pounder for the Chicago World’s Fair; seven years later, in Paris, his entry weighed 400 pounds. His next world record—403 pounds at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair—would hold for more than 70 years.”

Vindication of an earlier world’s record comes from a stereoview card titled “Great is Ontario and Great is her Squash” in the collection of the Huron County Museum in Ontario, which shows Warnock’s squash on display at the Columbian Exposition with a hand-written annotation of “480 pounds” on top of the curious cucurbita.

REFERENCES

“Nearing Its Close” Windsor (ON) Star, Sep. 29, 1893, p. 1.

“The Girl in the Pumpkin” San Francisco Call, Mar. 17, 1901, p. 11.

Borrell, Brendan “The Great Pumpkin” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2011.